You know: having to spend all day long taking care of his jail and prisoners in addition to staying close to the sheriff’s office in case Eef might need him, he would have to get some rest and the only way he could work it would be after he et supper until Miz Biglin, who acted as his alarm clock, got back from the picture show, which would be from roughly seven o’clock to roughly more or less half-past nine or ten o’clock, depending on how long the picture show was, the balance of the night standing or setting in a folding chair jest outside Flem’s window, not for a reward or even glory, since nobody but Miz Biglin knowed it, but simply outen fidelity to Eef Bishop’s sworn oath to defend and protect human life in Jefferson even when the human life was Flem Snopes’s. Yet outen the whole twenty-four hours Mink could a picked, he had to pick one between roughly seven o’clock and roughly nine-thirty to walk in on Flem with that thing whoever sold it to him told him was a pistol, almost like Mink done it outen pure and simple spite — a thing which, as the feller says, to a dog shouldn’t happen.”
“Drive on,” Stevens said. “Pick it up.”
“Yes,” Ratliff said. “So this is what it all come down to. All the ramshacking and foreclosing and grabbling and snatching, doing it by gentle underhand when he could but by honest hard trompling when he had to, with a few of us trying to trip him and still dodge outen the way when we could but getting over-trompled too when we couldn’t. And now all that’s left of it is a bedrode old lady and her retired old-maid schoolteacher daughter that would a lived happily ever after in sunny golden California.
But now they got to come all the way back to Missippi and live in that-ere big white elephant of a house where likely Miss Allison will have to go back to work again, maybe might even have to hump and hustle some to keep it up since how can they have mere friends and acquaintances, let alone strangers, saying how a Missippi-born and -bred lady refused to accept a whole house not only gift-free-for-nothing but that was actively theirn anyhow to begin with, without owing even Much obliged to nobody for getting it back. So maybe there’s even a moral in it somewhere, if you jest knowed where to look.”
“There aren’t any morals,” Stevens said. “People just do the best they can.”
“The pore sons of bitches,” Ratliff said.
“The poor sons of bitches,” Stevens said. “Drive on. Pick it up.”
So somewhere about ten o’clock he sat beside Ratliff in the dark car on a hill road that had already ceased to be a road and soon would cease to be even passable, while Ratliff said, “So you think she really didn’t know what he was going to do when he got out?”
“Yes I tell you,” Stevens said. “Drive on.”
“We got time,” Ratliff said. “He ain’t going nowhere. Talking about that thing he used for a pistol, that he dropped or throwed it away while he was running through that back yard. Eef Bishop let me look at it. That Memphis feller was right. It didn’t even look like a pistol. It looked like a old old mud-crusted cooter. It had two shells in it, the hull and another live one.
The cap of the hull was punched all right, only it and the live one both had a little nick jest outside the cap, both of the nicks jest alike and even in the same place, so that when Eef taken the live one out and turned the hull a little and set it back under the hammer and cocked it and snapped it and we opened the cylinder, there was another of them little nicks in the case jest outside the cap, like sometimes that mossback firing pin would hit the cap and sometimes it wouldn’t.
So it looks like Mink either tried out both of them shells beforehand for practice test and both of them snapped once, yet he still walked in there to kill Flem jest hoping one of them would go off this time, which don’t sound reasonable; or that he stood there in front of Flem and snapped both of them at him and then turned the cylinder back to try again since that was all he had left he could do at that moment, and this time one of them went off. In that case, what do you reckon Flem’s reason was for setting there in that chair letting Mink snap them two shells at him until one of them went off and killed him?”
“I don’t know,” Stevens said harshly. “Drive on!”
“Maybe he was jest bored too,” Ratliff said. “Like Eula. Maybe there was two of them. The pore son of a bitch.”
“He was impotent,” Stevens said.
“What?” Ratliff said.
“Impotent. When he got in bed with a woman all he could do was go to sleep. — Yes!” Stevens said. “The poor sons of bitches that have to cause all the grief and anguish they have to cause! Drive on!”
“But suppose it was more than that,” Ratliff said. “You was town-raised when you was a boy; likely you never heard of Give-me-lief. It was a game we played. You would pick out another boy about your own size and you would walk up to him with a switch or maybe a light stick or a hard green apple or maybe even a rock, depending on how hard a risk you wanted to take, and say to him, ‘Gimme lief,’ and if he agreed, he would stand still and you would take one cut or one lick at him with the switch or stick, as hard as you picked out, or back off and throw at him once with the green apple or the rock. Then you would stand still and he would take the same switch or stick or apple or rock or anyways another one jest like it, and take one cut or throw at you. That was the rule. So jest suppose—”
“Drive on!” Stevens said.
“ — Flem had had his lief fair and square like the rule said, so there wasn’t nothing for him to do but jest set there, since he had likely found out years back when she finally turned up here again even outen a communist war, that he had already lost—”
“Stop it!” Stevens said. “Don’t say it!”
“ — and now it was her lief and so suppose—”
“No!” Stevens said “No!” But Ratliff was not only nearer the switch, his hand was already on it, covering it.
“ — she knowed all the time what was going to happen when he got out, that not only she knowed but Flem did too—”
“I won’t believe it!” Stevens said. “I won’t! I can’t believe it,” he said. “Don’t you see I cannot?”
“Which brings up something else,” Ratliff said. “So she had a decision to make too that once she made it, it would be for good and all and too late to change it. She could a waited two more years and God His-self couldn’t a kept Mink in Parchman without He killed him, and saved herself not jest the bother and worry but the moral responsibility too, even if you do say they ain’t no morals.
Only she didn’t. And so you wonder why. If maybe, if there wasn’t no folks in heaven, it wouldn’t be heaven, and if you couldn’t recognise them as folks you knowed, wouldn’t nobody want to go there.
And that someday her maw would be saying to her, ‘Why didn’t you revenge me and my love that I finally found it, instead of jest standing back and blind hoping for happen-so? Didn’t you never have no love of your own to learn you what it is?’ — Here,” he said.
He took out the immaculately clean, impeccably laundered and ironed handkerchief which the town said he not only laundered himself but hemstitched himself too, and put it into Stevens’s blind hand and turned the switch and flicked on the headlights. “I reckon we’ll be about right now,” he said.
Now the road even ceased to be two ruts. It was a gash now, choked with brier, still mounting. “I’ll go in front,” Ratliff said. “You growed up in town. I never even seen a light bulb until after I could handle a straight razor.” Then he said, “There it is” — a canted roof line where one end of the gable had collapsed completely (Stevens did not recognise, he simply agreed it could once have been a house) above which stood one worn gnarled cedar.
He almost stumbled through, across what had been a fence, a yard fence, fallen too, choked fiercely with rose vines long since gone wild again. “Walk behind me,” Ratliff said. “They’s a old cistern. I think I know where it is. I ought to brought a flashlight.”
And now, in a crumbling slant downward into, through, what had been the wall’s old foundation, an orifice, a black and crumbled aperture yawned at their feet as if the ruined house itself had gaped at them. Ratliff had stopped. He said quietly: “You never seen that pistol. I did. It didn’t look like no one-for-ten-dollars pistol. It looked like one of a two-for-nine-and-a-half pistols.
Maybe he’s still got the other one with him,” when Stevens, without stopping, pushed past him and, fumbling one foot downward, found what had been a step; and,
